Silk

And it wasn’t the fairy-tale lies she’d told them that scared her, that made her almost too afraid of what she’d find waiting at the end of Cullom Street to keep moving, not her father or the angels that had never stopped coming anyway, hunting her through sleep and the grinding days. None of them had ever suspected, not even Walter who hadn’t believed any of it for a second, that the talisman could be one thing to them, protection, and something entirely different to her. Insurance, binding them together, like a wedding band, stronger than gold or silver because it had been made of them. Robin had almost torn it all apart, and she had patched it back together with wood and blood and strands of their hair.

The rat-toothed cold gnawed at her body, inside and out, playing sidekick to the crushing weight in her head. Together, they would pull her down and leave her broken and alone, lost in impossible white, suffocating. If she was weak, if she let them. So she made a picture of Robin in her mind, beloved symbol for all she stood to lose, and stepped around the pain.

They left Mort and Theo in the diner, resolutely eating their breakfast and talking to Billy. Would have left Keith, too tired of chasing after Spyder’s crazy ass to care, he’d said, but Daria had pulled him out of the booth anyway, two dollar bills tossed on the table, and she’d pushed him grumbling out the door. By the time they reached the parking lot, Spyder was already past the Pizza Hut, a coal smudge on linen. Niki stopped and shouted for her to wait until her throat hurt.

“She doesn’t even give a shit, Dar,” Keith said. “Spyder Baxter doesn’t need any help finding her way back home,” and Daria looked at Niki, waiting for an answer, a reason why this still had anything to do with them.

“She didn’t ask for your help last night, either,” Niki said, and Keith shook his head. “Yeah, well, but right now she ain’t about to get her butt kicked.”

“He’s right,” Daria said, as if maybe it was a little painful to admit. “She acts like this sometimes, Niki. She has problems, you know?”

“She’s scared fucking shitless,” Niki said, watching Spyder getting smaller in the distance, listening to the wind, the lonely wail like mourners in the bare tree limbs. “That’s all I know, Daria. And I just want to make sure she gets home okay.”

Daria hesitated, glanced back at the warmth and shelter of the diner, up at the sky hanging purple and almost low enough to touch.

“Come on, then,” sighed resignation, was already two or three steps past Niki, hauling Keith by the arm again. “I don’t even know where the bitch lives, and if we keep standing around talking about it, we’re go

“Thanks,” Niki said, taking long strides to catch up.

4.

A long way off, still, but Niki could see the yellow crime tape fluttering in the wind. Familiar enough thing to know the words by heart, Crime Scene-Do Not Cross, a hundred different murders or burglaries in the Quarter, suspicious fires and that happy-bright plastic stretched across a doorway or burned-out window. But waiting for them, there at the top of Cullom Street, tied tight between two old trees, it had never looked more like a warning.

Halfway up the mountain, the snow had begun again, nothing like the night before, but hard enough that it intensified the impression that she was tramping through some fairyland or Ice Age waste, and Niki was starting to feel sick, ill from the cold and exhaustion, had been plagued for the last five minutes with the idea that there was someone else walking with them, someone visible just at the corner of her vision. She’d turn to see, expecting Mort, or maybe Theo, and there was never anyone but Keith, face red and pissed off, cursing her and Spyder and the storm, Daria the same. And now, there was the police tape.

Part of her wanted to sit down in the snow and cry, cry until this was over. That part she thought she’d left behind, thought she’d shed forever like a bad skin, but instead Niki kept walking, ignoring the new cold leading her stomach, dread and everything that tape might mean. Ignoring how tired she was and the urgent little voice inside that begged her to see this had nothing to do with her, begged her to walk away from it all, while there was still time.

Spyder paused at the barrier of tape, and Niki thought then that she would wait, that they would catch up at last, but then she vanished into the shadows beneath the trees; when they finally reached the yellow tape, there was nothing waiting for them but Spyder’s footprints. She hadn’t crossed the line, had gone through a hedge and around.

“Okay,” air gasped and Keith’s words slipped in between. “What…the hell’s…going on…now?”

“Cops,” Daria said, and Niki could only nod, point at the dark house set back away from the road and more of the yellow tape strung like garland around the porch, ripped loose and dangling at the front door.

The Radley house, she thought. It’s the goddamned Radley house. Spyder’s tracks and nothing else, lonesome scar across the snow, all traces of whatever might have happened in the night erased, buried, by the storm.

Hey, Boo? Wa

Howl from her dreams, civil defense siren wail and the sound that came from her when she opened her sleeping mouth to answer them. The sound, remembered, that had kept her mother awake on muggy suburban nights. The sound of the sky falling at the end of the world.

“Spyder!” she screamed, and “Spyder! Where are you?!” But the house ate her voice alive, digested the words whole and added them to the sound, and the sudden smash and tinkle of breaking glass.

Niki rushed from room to room, hardly a thing noticed but the smell of old dust and the way the wail grew louder the further she went, past a kitchen and down a hall with peeling paper and the ghosts of missing pictures hanging on the walls.

The last room, very last place she looked, a tall black utility shelf pulled over and the glass ankle deep, tiny bodies like drops of ink amid the wreckage, scarlet warnings on countless bellies. With one arm, Spyder cradled something against her chest, something small that Niki couldn’t see, and with her free hand she punched out window after window, windows painted black and spider-webbed with white paint and impossible care. And now the wail was changing, plunging octaves, an endless growl as Spyder drove her fist through another pane, shattered another perfect web, and the weak sun through the holes glistened on her bloody knuckles.

“Stop it!” Niki screamed and was crunching through the glass, scrambling across the bed to Spyder on the other side.

But Spyder pushed her easily away with the bloody hand, shoved her back down onto the bed and into the aqaurium glass biting at her thick clothes. And the growling was warping into words, pain and rage across Spyder’s lips and enough like words that Niki could understand them.

“I have to let them out,” she said. “All of them. I have to let them out. Houses catch things.”

And she turned away, and another window burst, blackened shards traded for the storm swirling in through half a dozen empty frames.

“Houses catch things, Niki.”

Niki wrestled her way free of the razor tangle on the bed, gashed her right palm in the process, and Keith’s dirty tube sock was immediately soaked a deep and ugly crimson. She grabbed Spyder again, soppy, bloody sock firm on one leather shoulder and spun her completely around, almost all the strength she had left, aimed the punch the way she’d been taught years and years ago, thumb safe outside so it wouldn’t break.